The Keys and Means to the Journeying of the Heart and Spiritual Progress

The keys and means to this journeying of the heart and spiritual progress are remembrance of God and reflective thought. The virtues of these are too numerous to be described.

Apart from uncountable benefits in the hereafter and human attainments and perfections a minor benefit pertaining to this tumultuous worldly life is as follows: everyone wants a solace and seeks a pleasure in order to be saved a little from the upheavals of life and its heavy burdens and to take a breather; everyone searches out something familiar and friendly to banish the loneliness. The social gatherings in civilized life afford a temporary but heedless and drunken familiarity intimacy and solace for one or two out of ten people. However eighty per cent live solitary lives in mountains or valleys or are driven to distant places in search of a livelihood or due to agencies like calamities and old age which make them think of the hereafter they are deprived of the sociableness of man’s groups and societies. The situation affords them no familiarity friendliness or consolation. And so the true solace and intimacy and sweet pleasure of such a person is being turned to his heart in those distant places and desolate mountains and distressing valleys to work it by means of the remembrance of God and reflective thought.

Saying: “Allah!” it is to become familiar with Him with his heart and through that familiarity to think of the things around him which were regarding him savagely as smiling on him familiarly and saying: “My Creator. Whom I am recollecting has innumerable servants here in my place of solitude just as He has everywhere. I am not alone; loneliness has no meaning.” Through his belief he receives pleasure from that familiarity. He understands the meaning of the happiness of life and offers thanks to God.